Comments on Auxier’s “The Sherpa and the Sage: Neville on the Determinate and the Possible”

Auxier’s metaphoric contrast between the Sherpa and the Sage is kind, gracious, and self-deprecating without being apologetic, and points to an important distinction between philosophical projects. John E. Smith told me at the beginning of my college sophomore year that to “hang out your shingle” as a philosopher is implicitly to claim Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Whitehead as your peers and that you intend to engage them and do better. Of course the chances of doing that are laughably miniscule, but that is what I set my sights on when I was seventeen, only two years older than Confucius when he came to know his task. If I had ever been deeply controlled by academic philosophy or academic religious studies, I would have gotten nowhere. But as it turned out, I was prized as an administrator from the beginning and got all my jobs because of that. People just left me alone as a philosopher, ignored my writings, and I was able to pursue my grandiose, romantic dream. Auxier footnotes my book Soldier, Sage, Saint for his conception of the sage. Actually, I have always thought of myself as closer to the soldier than the sage because of all my institutional battles. Less bellicosely, I think of myself as a Confucian scholar-official. “Sherpa” is a good designation for Auxier in light of all the heavy lifting he has done for the profession, editing books, book series, journals, and reviving the view of American philosophy from his own perspective. But he is also a creative philosopher in his own right, even if that often takes the form of correcting others such as Royce, Whitehead, and me.

In his address he has posed some questions that are serious for all of us. Let me take up as many as I can.

His first set of questions concerns the use of quantifiers and the distinction between universals and particulars in my dialectical argument for understanding being as the ontological act of creation. To respond I need to clarify a confusion that comes from my expository habit of illustrating the very abstract discussion of determinate things as harmonies with examples of determinate things such as temporal processes. The analysis of determinateness yields some categories of the utmost abstractness, abstractness in the sense of Peirce’s vagueness. This is to say, they need to tolerate any kinds of determinate things whatsoever. When I’m calling attention to determinateness as such, with categories such as harmonies with essential and conditional components, traits such as form, components formed, existential location, and value identity, all having reality as together and yet different from one another because of the ontological creative act, no reference to any specific kind of determinate thing is made. In that instance, “determinate” means “any determinate thing.” I call the act “ontological” because it is what the theory asserts is the being of determinate things, and I call the traits of determinate things “cosmological” because any determinate cosmos would have to fit as an interpretation of or instance of the vague metaphysics with ontological and cosmological elements. There is no ontological creative act without some determinate things created, and no cosmological traits of anything without the ontological creative act creating something.

Another part of my systematic philosophy is a philosophical cosmology that tries to describe the generic traits of this world, something like Whitehead’s and Peirce’s enterprises. I think a philosophical cosmology should be vague with respect to the many kinds of scientific theories and research projects that describe the world experimentally and with reductive attention to their theoretical and material instruments, as well as being vague with respect to what might be exhibited in art, religion, politics, and what Whitehead called the “breadth of civilized experience.” My own philosophical cosmology, which is expressed in my three-volume Axiology of Thinking, is in the neighborhood of Peirce, Whitehead, Dewey, and many of you, though also intended to be a modern version of Boston, that is Western, Confucianism. In Ultimates I finesse most of the details of...